How can we use elements of a literary work to give us clues about the works intended audience?literary work

This is a very difficult question to answer, not because it is irrelevant or vague because it has so many ambivalent aspects to it.

First and foremost, is there an intended readership or audience in the mind of the author at the time of composition? The idea of the 'target audience' works in definitive genres like high art, low art, children's literature and so on. But in today's postmodern literary world, when high and low art forms are mixed up and all genres deconstructed, the very idea of a 'target audience' is in shambles. Secondly, the figuration of the authorial intent is not something that we talk about these days. The text is seen as an independent body, instead.

But with reader-response theory, the role of the audience has really been foregrounded especially in the cognitive act of completing the authorial meaning if there is one at all. The technique of the inbuilt reader is used in many of the contemporary works and that characterization can give he readers some idea about the intended audience.

Apart from this the style or the content of a work, the motifs involved the kind of characterization, the language in which it is written basically depending on the order of difficulty sometimes do give us a rough idea of the kind of readership, for which it is meant.